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Reflections upon the Sociology of Herbert Spencer[1]

Charles Horton Cooley

I imagine that nearly all of us who took up sociology between 1870, say, and 1890 did
so at the instigation of Spencer. While he did not invent the word (though most of us had
never heard it before), much less the idea, he gave new life to both, and seemed to show
us an open road into those countries which as yet we had only vaguely yearned to explore.
His book, The Study of Sociology, perhaps the most readable of all his works, had a
large sale and probably did more to arouse interest in the subject than any other
publication before or since. Whatever we may have occasion to charge against him, let us
set down at once a large credit for effective propagation.

It is. certain that nearly all of us fell away from him sooner or later and more or
less completely. My own defection, I believe, was one of the earliest and most complete;
and since the recoil has gone farther with me than with most others, it is not unlikely
that I now fail to do him justice. However, my views, such as

(130) they are, have at least had ample time to mature, and I offer them for what they
may be worth.

The ancestors of Herbert Spencer were plain people of the English middle class, most of
them dissenters from the Established Church and somewhat radical in politics. His father,
however, was a man of marked ability, u teacher noted for ingenious ways of evoking
interest, and the author of a work on Inventional Geometry in which this subject
was taught by a method of experiment and discovery. An uncle, Thomas Spencer, took a
degree at Cambridge and became somewhat distinguished in the church, rather as an agitator
of reforms, however, than in orthodox activities. He was frequently at odds with his
colleagues and finally went so far as to advocate the separation of church and state. The
innovating spirit observed in his father and uncle was justly regarded by Spencer as a
precious part of his own heredity. His mother was amiable and devoted but apparently of no
marked individuality, rather harshly treated by her husband, and sometimes referred to by
her son as an example of the ill effects of too much self-abnegation.

Herbert received very little systematic instruction. This seems to have been due partly
to his father's views, exalting self-activity and disinclined to force natural
inclinations, and partly to the boy's delicate health. His mind was active, but chiefly
upon inquiries of his own—into mechanics, natural history, or ethics—and even
then he showed signs of that incapacity for sustained reading which was pathological in
his mature years. He began Latin and Greek, but apparently did not get enough to be of any
use, and never studied English grammar at all. Indeed, apart from a limited ability to
read French acquired later, Spencer seems never to have had the use of any foreign or
ancient language. Nor does it appear that he ever studied history, literature, or
philosophy, except as he was incited to occasional reading in these subjects by the
requirements of his own work.

At the age of fourteen his uncle, with whom he was then living describes him as having
superior talents but lacking diligence and modesty,[2] this last judgment
referring to the irrepressible con-

(131) tentiousness for which he was at all ages remarkable. We may think of him, then,
as a bright, argumentative boy, rather disagreeably self-confident, well supplied with
ideas, many of them original, regarding mathematics, natural science, and the conduct of
life, but notably deficient in the foundations of traditional culture.

At seventeen Spencer got a job as a civil engineer and was engaged in this work four
years, showing an aptitude for it which might apparently have led to distinguished
success, had he not preferred to give it up and try for something more befitting the large
faculties of which he was conscious.

The period from twenty-one to twenty-eight was spent in desultory study and brief
experiments at making a living. He tried writing, editing, and inventing, with indifferent
pecuniary success, and was employed more profitably upon a parliamentary investigation of
certain railways. At one time he took an active part, on the radical side, in a political
campaign. At twenty-eight he got work as sub-editor of the London Economist. The
duties were light, leaving him ample time for other pursuits, and he was thus enabled to
develop his ideas, increase his acquaintance, practice writing, and pass gradually into
that career of philosophic thought and publication which occupied the remainder of his
life.

The character of Spencer's sociology is so interwoven with his personal traits that I
find that my best approach to it will be through an inquiry as to how far his nature and
training fitted him to deal with this subject. That he possessed very great powers is too
obvious to dwell upon; I shall therefore occupy myself chiefly with indicating certain
limitations.

I think, then, that Spencer was not by nature especially suited to be an observer of
mankind and of society. It seems clear, from his own account of himself in his Autobiography
as well as from other witnesses, that he was rather deficient in those sympathetic
qualities which are after all the only direct cource of our knowledge of other people. A
lack of tack, which he deplored but did not overcome, was accentuated by a somewhat
censorious and unconciliatory way of expressing himself, both of which traits

(132)

he ascribes to heredity. "The Spencers of the preceding generation," he says,
"were all characterized by lack of reticence."[3] On the other
side, "my mother was distinguished by extreme simplemindedness; so much so that,
unlike women in general, she was without the thought of policy in her dealings with other
persons. In me these traits were united."' " The tendency to
fault-finding," he adds, ' is dominant—disagreeably dominant."[4]
He thought this was probably " a chief factor in the continuance of my celibate life.
Readiness to see inferiorities rather than superiorities must have impeded the finding of
one who attracted me in adequate degree."[5] It would be ungenerous
and indeed injudicial to convict one of a defect of this delicate nature solely from his
own confession; the confession is ingratiating and in some measure contradicts itself. It
accords, however, with the impression one gets not only from the Autobiography but
from the authorized life by Duncan and from contemporary anecdotes, which is that of a
nature highminded indeed and in its way fine-minded, but unsympathetic and of a
schoolmasterish sort of egotism, prone to read other people lectures rather than to hear
what they have to say. This native lack of touch was increased by his preoccupation with
speculative ideas. " I am a bad observer of humanity in the concrete," he says,
"being too much given to wandering off into the abstract."[4]
He was, in short, quite the opposite in these regards of his compatriot Lord Roberts, of
whom it is said:

He had .... an immense power of sympathetic absorption in the affairs of
others. He spoke to you not only with his whole attention for the time being, he went
further than that: he gave you the impression that this was the supreme moment of the day
for which he had been waiting. He entered so fully, so sympathetically, into my interests,
that I was tempted to expand and to confide in him even private affairs, in no way
connected with the matter .... that I had come about.[6]

Spencer's disregard of personality is curiously illustrated by his essay on "The
Philosophy of Style." In this he does not appear to he interested in the fact—if
indeed he perceives it at all—that

(133) at least half of style is the communication of personal attitudes, and this by
means so subtle as to defy the rather mechanical analysis which he employs. The whole
study, therefore, lacks penetration and, I should suppose, would be a most unsafe guide to
practice.

This lack of insight into other minds, whether in face-to-face intercourse or through
works of literature and art, was nothing less than a lack of the perceptions indispensable
to any direct study of social phenomena. It was a fatal handicap.

Of the same piece with his defect of sympathy is Spencer's lack of literary and
historical culture, which, for an intellectual man and a writer, was remarkable. Not only
did he have no discipline of this sort, to speak of, in his youth, but in his later years
his nervous trouble appears to have prohibited any sustained reading not indispensable to
his work. His power of attention, limited to some two hours a day, was infringed not only
by serious application but by a novel or a newspaper or even by hearing others read. For
these reasons, quite sufficient and by no means discreditable to him, he had, apparently,
only a perfunctory knowledge of English literature and practically none of any other. In
middle life he organized for his works on sociology much historical material compiled by
assistants, but by that time the bent of his mind was fixed; and, moreover, he approached
this material with a set purpose and not in the disinterested attitude propitious to
culture. Canon Barnett, with whom he made the Nile trip in 1879, wrote in a letter,
"He is strangely ignorant of history and literature; so I should be shy of taking any
of his facts," adding, "He is not interesting. There are few matters which he
knows enough of, or is interested enough in, to discuss."[7]
Whatever his knowledge, Spencer certainly had little or nothing of the historical
sentiment, no brooding sympathy with the movements of the human spirit in the past.
Anything of this sort was quite alien to his formal and positive mode of thought.

He not only lacked culture, in the usual meaning, but he set a lou value on it, he
almost scorned it. Had Greece and Rome never existed," he remarks, "human life
and the right conduct of

(134) it would have been in their essentials exactly what they now are: survival or
death, health or disease, prosperity or adversity, happiness or misery, would have been
just in the same ways determined by the adjustment or non-adjustment of actions to
requirements. "[8]

Is this true? I think not; Greece and Rome are of our lifeblood. It seems to me,
indeed, that such expressions reveal a defect which is more detrimental to truth than
ignorance, namely contempt for essential knowledge. A man may lack a certain kind of
culture, as Keats lacked Greek, and yet have a sympathy and reverence which brings him
close to it; but Spencer was not a man of this sort. His was not that lowly mind which
enters easily all the doors of knowledge. Humility is hardly to be found in him and his
attitude toward such matters as history, literature, philosophy, and the fine arts is that
of one who does not need to pore over the records of the past, but is already competent,
by virtue of natural gifts and a philosophy of his own device, to instruct the world on
these questions. He displays, in short, a cocksureness that does nothing to reconcile us
to his insufficiency.

It is no crime in a man not to care for the loveliness of St. Mark's church at
Venice—we all have our blind spots. But what shall we say of one who, with no title
to competence, assumes to set aside the judgment of time and to pronounce, after a page of
rather fatuous comment, that it is "not precious aesthetically considered " ?[9]
Are not such judgments bold with the boldness of the man who declares that the earth is
flat, because it looks so to him ? And this is typical of Spencer's attitude not only
toward art but toward marry other things of which he knew equally little. It argues, I
think, a certain incomprehension of the nature of phenomena of this sort, and of the
conditions necessary to their appreciation. Works of literature and the various arts have
their being in a traditional organism of thought and expression, and there is no hope of
participating fully in their spirit except as one earns a membership in that organism.
This is done by sympathy by open-mindedness, and by reverent study of works which promise
to repay such study.

(135)

I do not mean that Spencer had a mind wholly insensible to the fine arts. He enjoyed
and even practiced music, for example, had considerable skill in drawing, and liked to
read aloud the poetry of Shelley. I mean that he seems to have no feeling for the
traditional, social, and personal elements that enter so largely into art and literature
and therefore no sense of the need of culture and sympathy in passing judgment upon them.

If our philosopher's defects of nature and education were such as I have indicated, iL
will not be surprising if we find that he lacked direct and authentic perception of the
structure and movement of human life, and that he conceived these phenomena almost wholly
by analogy. 'I he organic wholes of the social order are mental facts of much the same
nature as personality, and much the same kind of sympathetic imagination is needed to
grasp them. This Spencer did not have, and accordingly his conceptions, however bold and
ingenious, are, in my opinion, not properly sociological at all.

If there is in Spencer one dominant trait, engendering both his qualities and his
defects, it is without doubt the energy of his speculative impulse. This was not only
immensely strong and bold but was combined in a signal degree with the need to think
exhaustively and in concrete terms. It thus impelled him not only to conceive a vast
scheme of cosmic principles but to develop these with apparent consistency in every
department of nature, fortifying each detail by clear statement and a convincing array of
facts. This chiefly gave him his great vogue with inquiring young men; he gratified two
needs of every sound mind: to think largely and to think in definitely conceivable forms.
Never vague or merely abstract, he saw in detail what he saw at all. No doubt, also, his
great pretensions and his rejection of traditional knowledge contributed to his
acceptation by confirming the inquiring young man in his own self-conceit.

So far as I am able to judge, Spencer had great gifts as an observer of inanimate
nature, and only his exorbitant speculative trend prevented his achieving, more important
results than he did. His questioning of accepted ideas, his persistency, his ingenuity and
manual skill (much greater than that of Darwin) were all

(136) valuable traits. What he mainly lacked as a natural scientist, I imagine, was
again humility. He was inclined to domineer over his facts, instead of listening with open
mind to what they had to say.

Spencer claimed that he had " equal proclivities towards analysis and
synthesis." This is true, in the sense that he had an equal need to sec his
conceptions in large and in detail, but I think that both his analysis and his synthesis
were a priori, that in both the disposition to work out preconceived ideas is far more
active than disinterested curiosity. Indeed, when he once gets to work, especially upon
social material, the latter is hardly discernible. He himself regrets that he was apt
"to be enslaved by a plan once formed "[10] and to slur over
difficulties.[11]'

Here, of course, is his most obvious inferiority to Darwin. While he may have surveyed
almost as many facts, he did so in a wholly different spirit. Darwin's great gift, I
suppose, was the combination of a humble and tireless curiosity with a generalizing power
vast, indeed, but by no means domineering. He collected facts and drew a theory from them,
while Spencer spun a theory from any material he happened to have and collected facts to
illustrate it. Hence, in spite of his ingenuity, he was far less original, less solid,
less truly the man of science than his contemporary. The inquiring young man will not long
remain content with Spencer if he has any gift for direct observation. He will presently
discover that the light which seems so clear is not daylight but the artificial
illumination of a theory; that the array of facts are but illustrations of the theory; and
that the assertions do not stand the test of real life.

The conception of organic process which Spencer gave most of his life to elaborating
remains meager. It grows longer and longer but never fills out with real flesh and blood.
Where will you find in him any of those illuminating flashes that show a conception
vividly and as a whole? It is all detail and formula, never a revelation.

Nothing could have been more odious to him than the suggestion that his work belonged,
psychologically, in a class with that

(137) of the systematizers of theology—Thomas Aquinas, perhaps, or John
Calvin—rather than with the true men of science. But would there not be some truth in
such a suggestion ?

Turning now from Spencer's talent to his works, there is perhaps nothing more
fundamental for our purpose than his social psychology. This is found in those four
chapters of his Principles of Psychology which treat of " Sociality and
Sympathy," " Egoistic Sentiments," "Ego-altruistic Sentiments,"
and "Altruistic Sentiments." The Principles of Psychology was first
published when Spencer was thirty-five, costing him such labor that he ascribes to it in
great part the impaired health from which he suffered thereafter. It did not at that time,
however, include any social psychology, but was concerned wholly with the development of
the individual mind. Apparently he did not perceive the need of a social psychology at all
until he began some years later to work out his sociology. Then, having, as he says,
" to follow out Evolution under those higher forms which societies present," he
was led to discuss " the special psychology of Man considered as the unit of which
societies are composed.''[12] The idea of treating the subject was, then,
an afterthought conceived rather late in life and carried out in a supplementary part of
his Psychology called " Corollaries," published in the second edition of
that work, which appeared when the author was fifty-two years old. It is not strange that
his discussion is somewhat perfunctory and involves no change from his previous modes of
thought.

Speaking summarily, I may say that he explains the social sentiments by their utility,
by conscious and unconscious adaptation to the conditions of life, and by the cumulative
inheritance of acquired mental traits. Natural selection is included but not much
emphasized; it is hardly essential to the argument. We are shown that the individual is
sympathetic because sympathy has been useful and habitual to the race in the past.
Transmitted by heredity and increased by use it is enabled, with the aid of the
representative powers of the mind, to unite with instinct in forming social sentiments.
These may be ego-altruistic (so called because

(138) they involve both a sense of one's self and a reference to the state of mind of
others, like the love of approbation); or they may be wholly altruistic, like a generosity
which seeks no recognition, or like a disinterested sense of justice. All sentiments,
however, are primarily egoistic, according to Spencer, and become altruistic when referred
to others. "'I he altruistic feelings," he says, "are all sympathetic
excitements of egoistic feelings."

Let me first point out that this phraseology of egoism and altruism marks an
individualistic conception; that is, it makes the whole matter one of the interplay of
separate units rather than of collective growth. A sentiment grows up in one person and
may be referred to another by sympathy: there is no idea of a continuing social life,
having an organization and history of its own, in which sentiments are gradually
developed, and from which they are derived by the individual. It cannot be said that
Spencer's treatment excludes such an idea, but his failure to develop it, here or
elsewhere, shows that it had no considerable part in his thought. And yet it is the
central conception of any real sociology, since any science of life must have a distinct
life-process with which it is concerned.

A sociological view, I think, would be that the higher sentiments are in general
neither egoistic nor altruistic as regards their source, but just social, derived, that
is, from the stream of an organic common life. It is, for example, an incorrect view of
the sense of justice to say that we first develop it regarding ourselves and then transfer
it by sympathy to others. Our sentiments of justice have been worked out by society in the
past and come to us primarily from the social environment and tradition, their reference
to myself or to you being secondary. We acquire them just as we do the meaning of the word
" justice," that is, we find the idea or sentiment already organized for us in
the current of history, assimilate it by the aid of conversation and literature, although
it must get flesh and blood, as it were, from our own experience. The social tradition
supplies the pattern which the individual fills out and colors in a mor or less original
manner. The proof is the established fact that the customs or mores of the group can make
almost anything appear to the individual as just or unjust.

(139)

Spencer's view is scarcely different from that of one who should maintain that the idea
of justice is created anew in each generation by heredity and sympathy, failing to see
that it also represents the accumulated wisdom of the past transmitted through language.
His process is not social but biological and individual.

The essential differences between present social psychology, as I understand it, and
the conception of Spencer may be otherwise stated as follows: We now believe that the
individual is born with decisive but quite rudimentary capacities and tendencies, owing
little or nothing to direct inheritance of the effects of use. For the development of
these into a human personality he is wholly dependent upon a social environment which
comes down from the past through an organic social process. This social process cannot be
inferred from individual psychology, much less from heredity; it must be studied directly
and is the principal subject of sociology.[13] It absorbs individuals into its life,
conforming them to its requirements and at the same time developing their individuality.
There is no general opposition between the individual and the social whole; they are
complementary and work together to carry on the historical organism. Neither is there any
general opposition between social environment and heredity; they also are complementary,
working together to carry on a human whole which is social in one aspect and biological in
another. Spencer, on the other hand, has little perception of a social organism
continuous with the past. His organism, so far as he has one, is biological in its
process, transmitted to the individual by the direct inheritance of mental states created
by use. No doubt, as he sees the matter, the individuals thus generated unite into a
differentiated and co-ordinated society, but this is conceived almost as if it were
continually reproduced from biological roots, like the annual foliage of a perennial herb.
Its historical continuity, momentum, and abundance of content, its power to mold
individuals as well as to be molded by them, is not clearly seen. And this is true of all
Spencer's sociology. It is

(140) biological-individualistic, the biology being of a type involving
use-inheritance, and the individualism of a mechanical sort quite inadequate to embrace
human personality.

It is a common impression that Spencer emphasized the social order at the expense of
the individual person. I would rather say that he had little conception either of a social
order, properly speaking, or of persons as members of that order, and consequently never
seriously confronted the problem of their relation. Such questions, for example, as that
of the precise nature and value of leadership are not worked out by him, because they
belong in that region of true, as distinguished from analogical, sociology which he
scarcely entered.[14]

At least one critic, Mr. J. M. Robertson, in his Modern Humanism has pointed out
that Spencer's thought about society shows two distinct currents, separate in their origin
and appearing to other minds irreconcilable. One apparently came from the intellectual
atmosphere surrounding his youth and early manhood! before he became in any sense an
evolutionist. It is essentially static individualistic, hedonistic; and is otherwise
remarkable for the doctrinaire thoroughness with which he worked it out and applied it to
questions of the day, often, it would seem, in defiance of sound practical judgment. The
other current is evolutionary, beginning apparently when he was about twenty in the
reading of Lyell's Geology (where he found an account of the views of Lamarck),
gradually gaining upon him as he grew older, greatly increased and modified by the
publication of the Origin of Species, when he was about forty, but never so
possessing his mind as to solve his thought into one consistent whole. He remained to the
end partly of the old time and partly of the new, asserting both tendencies with equal
conviction, unaware of any incompatibility, and never becoming an evolutionist in the
sense that most men are who have grown up in Darwinism.

Among the works in which the first influence is ascendent are Social Statics—his
first book published when he was thirty— the Principles of Ethics and Man versus
the State, the two latter

(141) appearing late in his life. In these his leading conceptions are pre-Darwinian,
in the sense that they have proved incapable of survival after Darwinism has had time to
develop its social implications. The point of view is individualistic and the practical
policy one of extreme laissez faire, as opposed to social control. The process is
conceived not as continuously evolutionary but as tending toward an ideal condition of
moving equilibrium, in which the relations of men to one another will be morally adjusted
and we shall all be as happy as we can reasonably desire. To this conception he adhered at
all times when he was dealing with questions of personal conduct or social policy.

I do not know that it would be worth while to argue at length that these ideas are
unevolutionary. The most convincing argument is that they have not in fact been able to
endure as a part of evolutionary thought. It is more and more recognized, I think, that
while the organic view of life implied in Darwinism is consistent with very great emphasis
upon individuality, it also involves an increasing consciousness and self-direction in the
process as a whole, irreconcilable with the drastic reduction of state functions advocated
by Spencer. And I am not aware that the idea of a coming equilibrium of human relations,
in the anticipation of which we can find a code of conduct, has any important following at
the present time. It is felt to be untenable.

His ideas on general evolution find their first expression in an essay called Progress:
Its Law and Cause, published in 1857, and are finally elaborated in First
Principles, which appeared in 1862, when he was forty-two years old. The second part
of First Principles, on the Knowable, contains matter which philosophic students of
sociology may still find worth while, and it is perhaps the only part of, Spencer which I
can recommend to such with any confidence. His method is to take elementary processes,
such as differentiation and co-ordination of parts and functions, and set them forth with
a great array of facts from the inorganic, the vegetable, and the animal worlds. and
finally from the social. This had a great effect upon me in the eighteen-eighties by
showing the life of man upon earth as one of progressive organization and so giving me an
animating and assuring perspective. Although

(142) I now think that the view thus revealed is superficial, nevertheless it was worth
seeing then and I see no reason why it should not be so now.

Regarded more closely, First Principles shows those defects of which I have
spoken. Human life is perceived not directly but through mechanical analogies. The higher
and more distinctively human part of it is hardly perceived at all; there is, for example,
no discussion of the growth of rational social guidance as a part of progress. The thought
is mechanized to a degree almost incredible to one who enters its stifling atmosphere from
the world out of doors.

I almost hesitate to quote Spencer's famous formula of evolution lest I may appear to
be ridiculing him. It has a quaint sound now, but as he himself regarded it as
quintessential we are hardly at liberty to pass it by. It runs, then, as follows:

Evolution is an integration of matter and concomitant dissipation of
motion; during which the matter passes from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a
definite, coherent heterogeneity; and during which the contained motion undergoes a
parallel transformation.[15]

Now the problem of evolution is the problem of life; and it is safe to say that if in
the future it is found possible to sum up the process of life in a formula it will not be
a formula of this kind. Life must be summed up in terms of life, not translated into
another language. Least of all is such a formula adequate to human life. You can never
compress reason and beauty and hope and fellowship and the organic being of communities
and nations into differentiations, coherences, and heterogeneities. These terms may be
applicable to human life, just as you can measure a man in inches and pounds, but they can
never be the essential and characteristic truth about it. There is more light and more
good sense in the simple statement of Comte that progress "consists in educing, more
and more, the characteristic faculties of humanity, in comparison with those of
animality."

Of Spencer's volumes on the Principles of Sociology' I need say little, not that
they are unimportant but because, being a logical development of his First Principles, they
do not offer anything

(143) fundamentally different. They are, in general, what one might expect; and the
value one sets upon them will vary with one's estimate of the point of view and method.
The material was collected under Spencer's direction by assistants, usually, I think, with
a definite plan as to what he meant to get out of it. It was rather an amassing of
illustrations than research, though fresh ideas often occurred to him in the process. If
we are content with a vast array of facts, sequently arranged and clearly interpreted in
accordance with large but somewhat mechanical conceptions, we shall regard these as
important works; if we think that human insight is a sine qua non they will seem
little more than a desert, the more forbidding the more there is of it.

Parts I and II are of a genera charact, called respectively " Data " and
" Inductions" of sociology. The remaining parts deal with special
institutions—domestic, ceremonial, political, ecclesiastical, professional, and
industrial. After three brief introductory chapters discussing the nature of social or
superorganic evolution, the classification of the factors, and the influence of climate,
geographical features, flora, and fauna, Spencer devotes the bulk of Part I to the nature
of primitive man, and chiefly to the genesis of his religious ideas. Although his
knowledge of this field was necessarily secondhand, the vigor and ingenuity of his mind
enabled him here as elsewhere to advance views which specialists regard with respect.

Part II is a discussion of the organic character of society, and therefore epitomizes
the nature and limitations of his sociological thought. Instead of being a direct and
searching analysis of the process of human life, it is wholly analogical and hence wholly
superficial. Not only is the proposition " Society is an organism " sustained by
biological comparisons, but the whole part, of some one hundred and fifty pages, is given
to such comparisons. Whatever is said about society is said under the evident domination
of conceptions derived from another order of phenomena; and that order is rather the
mechanical than the biological, since his biology is itself rather mechanical than vital.
The terms of his summing up are similar to those of his general formula of evolution, and
the whole part adds nothing of much importance to what we get

(144) from his First Principles. I would not object to the use of biological
analogy as a source of nomenclature and framework; every new growth of knowledge, I
suppose, has to use the language of the old. But surely the material itself, the
observation and conception, should be essentially direct and fresh, and with Spencer it is
not so.

The elaborate discussion of particular institutions that follows is always clear,
always vigorous, always ingenious, and always subject to the limitations I have pointed
out. In some cases, as in his treatment of the opposition between militarism and
industrialism, he sets forth practical truth of great moment, but never, I think, without
a certain superficiality inseparable from his method.

Descriptive Sociology is a publication, in eight atlas-like volumes, of material
compiled by his assistants, primarily for other works, and giving historical and
descriptive data regarding the principal savage and barbarous peoples—African,
Asiatic, and American— and also regarding the Hebrews and Phoenicians, the French,
and the English. The facts and references are arranged in parallel columns under
appropriate captions, so that it is easy to find what one seeks. I have made some use of
these works, and it is my impression that they are much less known than they deserve to
be. For students making comparative studies covering a wide range of societies they should
be of much service. They were published by subscription and represent on Spencer's part a
large pecuniary sacrifice to scientific ideals. When their publication ceased, he
estimated his net loss at about £4,ooo.

The two strongest impressions I receive on re-reading parts of Spencer are that of the
fixity of his limitations and that of the abundance of his mind within those limitations.
Although, if I am right, his way of seeing and thinking was not sociological, it was
large, keen-edged and propelled by an intellectual passion almost sublime. 'l trough
commonly described as an infidel, his work was a signal act of faith. Never timid or
half-hearted, he stained with his life-blood every detail of his vast scheme and defended
as a mother defends her child. He spent his whole life in the elucidation and propagation
of truth as he saw it, devoting without question

(145) his spirit and all its instruments to this supreme object. Some of his chief
defects were virtues in excess; as he might have been more of a man of science had he been
less ardent as a philosopher and moralist. That he was a moralist, somewhat dogmatic, but
sincere and ready to make sacrifices, there can be no doubt. He shone also as a critic of
easy-going conventions. Bold, ingenious, iconoclastic, pungent in illustration, he loved
to demolish shams and did it extremely well. He raked up and burned much theological and
other rubbish, earning the gratitude of all the liberal world.

If I have seemed to depreciate him it is perhaps because Spencer set his claims so high
that any attempt to estimate them almost inevitably takes the form of lowering his own
mark. But, when all is said, he remains a man of extraordinary powers and vast influence
upon the thought of his day, if not altogether the equal mate of Darwin that we once
supposed him to be.

Notes

A paper read before the Research Club of the University of Michigan at a meeting held to
commemorate the centenary of Spencer's birth. On the same occasion Alfred H. Lloyd read a
paper on Spencer's philosophy, which appears in the Scientific Monthly for June,
1920.

Autobiography, I, 119.

Autobiography, II, 329. ibid., p. 520.

Ibid., p. 512.

Ibid., p. 461.

Mortimer Menoes, Lord Roberts, p. 7.

Canon Barnett, by his wife, I, 230-31.

Autobiography, II, 43.

Ibid., pp. 407-8.

Autobiography, II, 215.

Ibid., I, 452.

Principles of Psychology, II, 508.

Much that has recently been published regarding the social workings of instinct shows
little improvement upon Spencer in this regard. I mean that it proceeds from an analysis
of instinct directly to social conclusions (sometimes of the most sweeping character),
without the least direct study of the social process. Even the instinct studied is usually
subhuman, that of man being inferred from analogy.

Compare the remarks on the relation of the individual to society in the Autobiography,
II, 343.

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